Taken at face value, the message of both of these myths seems crystal clear: certain mysterious structures scattered around the world were built to preserve and transmit the knowledge of an advanced civilization of remote antiquity which was destroyed by a terrifying upheaval. Melza put my question to him and a moment later translated her grandfather’s reply: ‘He says, “why do you want to know”?

And so far we haven’t tried because our rational, scientific culture regards myths and traditions as ‘unhistorical’. Under such circumstances, ten or twelve thousand years from now (with all written records and film archives long since destroyed) what testimony might our descendants still preserve concerning the events at the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 of the Christian era?

Like the Ancient Maya whose descendants all across the Yucatan are convinced that the end of the world is coming in the year 2000 y pico (and a little), the Hopi believe that we are walking in the last days, with a geo1ogica1 sword of Damocles hanging over us. Moreover, the whole layout of the Giza plateau seems to point to a date many thousands of years earlier than the date of its supposed construction – a date revealed in the astronomical alignments of the Pyramids, the ‘mansions of a million years’, home of the god Osiris, the bringer of agriculture to the Egyptians, like Quetzalcoatl, after a flood.

The possession of a conscious, articulated history is one of the faculties that distinguishes human beings from animals. Travelling first to South and Meso-America, Graham finds evidence of myths of a white-skinned ‘god’ named Quetzalcoatl or ‘Viracocha’ who came from a drowned land bringing knowledge of farming and culture after a great flood. The author proposes that sometime around the end of the last ice age this civilization ended in cataclysm, [3] but passed on to its inheritors profound knowledge of such things as astronomy, architecture and mathematics. We’d want, for example, to tell them – those distant grandchildren of ours – when we had lived in relation to their time.In fact, it is only in recent times that modern man has been able to map this coastline using sub-surface surveying techniques that can penetrate the ice sheet that lies on top of it. At the core of Hancock’s argument is this hypothesis: like I said above, there once exist lost ancient civilisations that have advanced technology, living during the Ice Age.

Another notable and outstandingly unusual feature of the Osireion was that it was not even approximately aligned to the cardinal points. Nevertheless the knowledge is there, should we wish to use it, because it has been preserved and transmitted in written records, in film archives, in allegorical paintings, in war memorials, and so on. There would be several other options and combinations of options open to us, depending on our circumstances, on the level of technology available to us, on the extent of the early warning we were given, and on which chronological facts we wanted to transmit. This had raised the reasonable suspicion in Naville’s mind (though Frankfort chose to ignore it) that the two chambers concerned were ‘not contemporaneous with the rest of the building’ but had been added much later during the reign of Seti I, ‘probably when he built his own temple’. Suppose that a tremendous cataclysm were to overtake the earth today, obliterating the achievements of our civilization and wiping out almost all of us.There are certain structures in the world, certain ideas, certain intellectual treasures, that are truly mysterious.